After all this, we could be certain in naming “Anecdote of the Jar” an ekphrastic poem, however, specifically in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign Krieger labels it an “anti-ekphrastic ekphrasis” (1992: 228). The reason for this is that the jar, as we can see at the end of the poem, though it succeeds in visually dominating the scene as a focal point, nevertheless remains closed and barren, does not give anything of itself or at least nothing that is alive which is the cause for it staying separate, at a distance of everything else in the wild, geographic region of Tennessee. Again, as with Williams, the choice of object and the way of its structuring into a poetic image is in actuality our view of the material reality and the consciousness regarding the objects that we experience sensually and linguistically, that is mentally.
Williams is received with misunderstanding by the contemporary readership and the later critical public because of the supposed impermeability of “The Red Wheelbarrow”. “Anecdote of the Jar” gives the answer: any poem cannot be experienced any differently because of the inherent “impermeability” of language, that is its separateness from corporeal nature. Man does not create the reality in which he lives, he can only, after the fact, imaginatively reconstruct it in an attempt to experience it more deeply and “birth” his own meanings.
References
Анчевски, Зоран. За традицијата. Скопје: Магор, 2007.
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Quartermain, Peter. “Reading The Difficult.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 1 Oct. 2013. Web. 30 Sept. 2015.
Rumens, Carol. “Poem Of The Week: The Red Wheelbarrow By William Carlos Williams.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 8 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2015.
Stevens, Wallace. “Anecdote of the Jar.” The Collected Poems Of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. 76.
—. “Imagination as Value.” The Necessary Angel. New York: Knopf, 1951. 133-156.
Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The Collected Poems Of William Carlos Williams:1909-1939. Eds. Arthur Walton Litz, and Christopher John MacGowan. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions, 1986. 224.
#b
1. Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1 Oct. 2013. Web, 30 Sept. 2015.
2. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) is a German author who in the work Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, as the title indicates, draws firm limits between the two arts by defining painting as static, i.e. spatial art, and poetry as dynamic or progressive, i.e. temporal art.
3. Quartermain, Peter. “Reading The Difficult.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 1 Oct. 2013. Web. 30 Sept. 2015.
4. The Collected Poems Of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939. Eds. Arthur Walton Litz, and Christopher John MacGowan. Vol. 1. New York: New Directions, 1986, p. 224
5. Rumens, Carol. “Poem Of The Week: The Red Wheelbarrow By William Carlos Williams.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 8 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2015.
6. Rumens, Carol. “Poem Of The Week: The Red Wheelbarrow By William Carlos Williams.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 8 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 Sept. 2015.
7. Stevens uses this word in a letter to Williams in which he criticizes him for exactly this type of technique in the building of the poetic image. (See: Kora In Hell, p. 17) The disagreement between Williams and Stevens consists in the following: Williams builds the poetic image by collecting different objects that at first sight seem to have nothing in common so that he can then, with the help of the imagination, discover the thing that connects them in their difference; Stevens, on the other hand, insists that the poet must begin from one central locus that he will break down thoroughly to the point of self-transcendence and will in that way show the hidden reality of all things.
8. The word is here used as an adjective, not a noun.
9. The Collected Poems Of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954, p. 76
10. Ibid. p. 76
11. Ibid. p. 76
12. Ibid. p. 76